Sente for iPad is Now Available!

For people who are interested in reading a bit about the application, but who may have missed some of my recent blog posts on the subject, here is list of short articles highlighting some of the important features of the new app:

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16 Comments

My first impressions are that it is great. It already is better than Papers and they've been in the app store forever.

Annotations seem to work fine for me. I'm having some trouble adding JSTOR pdfs - perhaps because of that new intermediate screen before they redirect you to the pdf? Not sure but I have not yet given it a proper try so it's far too early to call this a problem...

Great work - sure there'll be suggestions for improvement in the future (the ICON! please bring the old icon back!!!) but for now enjoy your holiday which is so well deserved and thanks for all the hard work!

Yes, agreed, Wizardgraphics, but without minimal passion for the question. ;-) I tend to separate these things, in my mind, into those tasks I do constantly (e.g., add initial highlighting, capture a quote, jot/edit a note, etc.) from the ones I do just every so often (e.g., decide to change the color of an existing highlight). I'll always notice excessive taps or mouse clicks for the former a lot more than the latter. In that respect, I think they really nailed the new annotation and note taking UI! The edit menu choices ("Highlight," "Quote," "Comment," and "Copy")—over which the developers struggled for about a week (true story!) in order to get just the right combination of intuitive commands that would require minimal taps to get stuff done—is a brilliant set. The breakthrough, I believe, was the idea of including highlighting color options right in the note editor window, so that you can choose "Quote" or "Comment," then pick a highlight color (or none) while entering your note, before dismissing the editor window. The old options (i.e., "Highlight," "Note," and "Both") from pre-6.2 desktop Sente were insufficient to handle the splitting out of "Quote" (for when you want to capture a quotation, +/- your own comments) from "Comment" (for when you don't want the quotation). Lastly, the new option to show a comment only as a margin note ("Show in PDF only") if you don't need it to be included in the reference's notes list, is the icing on the cake for this new note taking UI. (Thanks, TSS, for this great UI!)

But I do agree with you, of course, that an explicit, "blister-saving" way to change highlight color (even if only occasionally) is a good suggestion. My thought on this would be to take a cue from the new Sente 6.2 popover and enhance the iPad's edit menu along those lines, i.e., include color choices (and line weights) right in the popover instead of waaaaay up in the navbar. Then there'd still be the question, as you raised re desktop Sente, of whether a color change should need two taps (i.e., choose new color then explicitly tap "Highlight"), as is currently the case on the desktop, or just one (i.e., dismissing the popover as soon as you tap a color swatch). Your argument for just one makes sense, but that introduces a UI inconsistency vs. the necessary behavior of the popover when first adding an annotation, in that, in the latter case, the menu has to remain open to allow someone to pick an initial highlight color and then still be able to choose between "Highlight" (only), "Comment," or "Quote." It could be argued that a UI inconsistency between the two scenarios would be more detrimental to UX than the occasional extra tap/click needed when infrequently changing an existing highlight's color. Also, in the case of region/rectangle annotations, one needs to be able to pick both color and line-weight, so, when adding the initial annotation, you wouldn't want the menu disappearing on just tapping a color.

Awesome!! I've been waiting months for this day to come. Desktop Sente is great, but a portable iPad Sente will make it much easier to read papers and take notes on the couch at home or while traveling. $19.99 is a bargain. Thanks for the early Christmas present.

John, I totally agree! Like Danny, above, I too was "a bit surprised at the price," although perhaps in the opposite direction. (No offense, Danny, as it seems you, too, consider it to have been money well spent.) Having paid more like $50 for some productivity apps (e.g., "Omnigraffle"), the low price of $19.95 was a very pleasant surprise. (I know there are "fart apps" out there for only $1.99, but the real work that goes into developing something like Sente for iPad deserves a bit more than that.)

(And apologies to TSS for saying "fart apps" and "Sente for iPad" in the same sentence.)

So a private support request and a regulated comments section. Like I really do not want to be vocal or anything. Really! You clearly did a good job and put out a unique app. I am not denying that. But nothing is perfect and the are some issues but if I were you and since there is no written blog policy of what to write in comments and since this a free discussion then I would not delete user comments because I would be telling them to say something nice about my product or shut up. As if the blog is just an ad that I direct myself! Believe me I am recommending Sente like crazy in my research facility and I didn't expect you to do this! Anyway, that is your blog and your choice. Thanks!

You posted an identical message in two places. Even if they were both in the support forum, I would delete one of them because I am not going to answer the same question in two places, nor leave one unanswered so that people reading later think we never answered the question. The fact that one of your two posts was on the blog, the choice of which to delete was easy. None of this is an attempt to silence you -- it is an attempt to provide you support late on a Sunday evening.

Playing with the app for a few days now, I have to say that my productivity has increased several folds. I go through my shared collections every where I have time like on the bus and I highlight and make notes and when I go back to my desktop version whether at home or in the office 'Boom' All my changes are there as well. This is a state of the art in synchronization. There are some issues but given the fact that this is the first version there is much room for improvement here. Great job TSS!

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About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by Michael published on December 16, 2010 1:09 AM.